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And he thought that made sense – it was her body and she was free to do what she liked with it. And also he was young and dumb – he didn’t realise how the surgery would change everything between them.
So he got the money and gave it to her. He did it because he loved her. Then he went away. And when he came back to her town, he watched her dance and he drank his San Miguel and then he held her hand all the way home.
And – how stupid was this man? – he only realised that he was having sex with a woman with fake breasts after the moment of penetration. He had not noticed them when she was dancing.
But now he noticed them, because he could hardly miss them. They did not feel even remotely real. They felt as in-authentic as alcohol-free lager or sugar-free sweetener. Even faker than that – because they were no substitute for the real thing. They were impostors.
How unnatural those breasts felt in his hands and mouth, how bogus on the tip of his tongue, how hard pressed against his chest – that’s the thing that shocked him most of all, the knock-on-wood hardness of the bloody things.
She had ruined herself. Really, he could not think of it any other way. Her silhouette now had something of the pouter pigeon about it. It broke his heart to see what she had done.
He did not stop loving her.
But they never made love again.
Why aren’t there armies of thinking women protesting about the grotesquely booming trade in bogus breasts? Why don’t women’s magazines stop slavishly printing pictures of pumped-up stars with their pathetic plastic tits sticking out? Is it because to really and truly know how rotten fake breasts are, you have to be a heterosexual man?
Buying off-the-peg breasts is becoming as acceptable as a woman colouring her hair or whitening her teeth. But it is of a totally different order. There is something obscene about seeing healthy young women mutilate themselves by stuffing two plastic bags full of gel into their breasts. Having a ‘boob job’ – society’s coy euphemism that hides the scarring, the risks to long-term health, and most of all the way good breasts get so casually traded for bad – is far closer to female circumcision than it is to any kind of cosmetic surgery.
But they look nice – right, girls?
‘There are so many images of women with amazing fake boobs, I didn’t think mine were good enough,’ said Jodie Marsh, at the grand unveiling of her new, allegedly improved 32GG superboobs. ‘I think society has forgotten what real boobs look like, and women like me end up thinking our boobs aren’t nice because they disappear into our armpits when we lie down.’
And now Jodie’s ‘boobs’ can point at the chandelier until the end of days. And I ask you – is that really better than breasts that can move around of their own free will?
Some of the most written about women in the country-Victoria Beckham, Jordan and Kerry Katona – have given Mother Nature a helping hand in the breast department. No doubt this love of fake breasts among the rich and famous (not to mention ageing and constantly photographed) is directly linked to a record number of teenagers having breast-enlargement surgery.
They don’t know what they are letting themselves in for.
There are plenty of female celebrities with healthy breasts that do not feel like a sailor’s wooden leg – off the top of my head, I think of Kate Moss, Sienna Miller and Leona Lewis-but unfortunately no operation exists to artificially inflate an insecure young woman’s self-esteem.
‘My boob job made me feel better,’ says EastEnders actress Lacey Turner.
What she means is that the operation made her feel better about herself. Trust me on this one, Lacey – no boob job ever made a woman feel better.
Don’t do it, girls. Renounce all breast enlargement. Turn your back, and your breasts, on that surgeon’s knife. If not for your man, then for your health. These breast-job babes blow my mind – these are women who would not dream of smoking a cigarette or going to the beach without sun block, yet they willingly undergo surgery that practically guarantees a health hazard in coming years.
Those vain – or insecure, or neurotic, or self-loathing – women willingly risk infection, breast pain, changes in nipple sensitivity, visible wrinkling, complications with breast feeding and asymmetric appearance (i.e. breasts so completely different that they resemble the brothers played by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny de Vito in Twins).
And what they never tell you in the celebrity rags is that off-the-shelf breasts can rupture.
You can give it a fancy name like mammoplasty enlargement or augmentation mammoplasty, but in the end it is just a bog standard boob job where a silicone shell is filled with either gel or sterile saline liquid and stuffed inside a woman’s breasts via various types of incision.
Inframammary incisions are inserted under the breast, and make a woman look like she has had some terrible domestic accident. Periareolar incisions go in through the nipple, which leaves less scarring but increases the risk of capsular contracture, when the body’s immune system tries to repel what it sees as a foreign invader.
There are other incisions – the transaxillary goes in through the armpit, the transabdominoplasaty through the stomach and the transumbilical goes in through the navel.
They all hurt like hell.
I have never met a woman who did not find breast enlargement the most painful experience of their life – including childbirth and watching their boyfriends dance at weddings. But this initial pain is likely to be just the start of her problems.
Those silicone shells can break, leak or slip. A woman can be left with her nipples pointing in different directions. Breast sensitivity often goes out the window when a woman goes for the fake boob option. The pain she feels after the operation can endure for years – perhaps forever.
It spoils sex for the man. And for the woman too.
So that’s sex spoilt for everyone then.
But last year in America alone, nearly half a million women had breast-enlargement surgery. I would suggest that not one of them is the woman they were before – imperfect perhaps, but with a natural beauty that no plastic surgeon could ever improve upon.
And speaking purely from the male perspective, sex with a woman wearing replicant breasts is no fun. That’s the vicious punchline – there’s this mirage of perfection, this pert promise of ultimate pleasure, and the vision evaporates the moment you reach out to touch them.
Fake breasts are the cock-tease from hell.
The dancer’s breasts were well done. On an objective level, the man could see that the surgery had been efficiently performed. There was none of the horrific scarring on the underside of the breasts that he had seen elsewhere. And yet they repelled him.
As well done as they were, these fake breasts did not belong on a real woman. They were artificially created monsters from some doctor’s menu of butchery.
In the cold light of day, she looked like a porn fantasy-sporting replicants that were there to attract, to be looked at, leered over, lusted after and remembered. But they were not really there to be touched.
They were not there for any man who might love this woman, or for any baby she might give birth to. It felt like those breasts were there for the rest of the world.
Don’t do it, girls.
Love what God gave you, no matter how much or how Double-AA. Small can be fun. Medium can be lovely. Large can be grand. Those hard, fake things are always awful. Do you really want to present those lifeless objects to the man you love? Do you really want to shove some surgeon’s rock-hard creation in your baby’s face?
Fake breasts desecrate a woman’s body. Fake breasts take the joy of sex and pump it full of lifeless gel. Fake breasts look bad, feel bad and will one day make you sick. And they are so horribly, unforgivably dangerous.
Keep your health, keep your self-respect, keep your man. It should not take a man to tell you – learn to love yourself the way you are.
Keep them real.
Six Humiliation (#ulink_596e9415-0dad-57f2-84d6-b74e17fb6694)
In my first year at school, my little chums played a wonderful joke on me. ‘I know,’ they giggled. ‘When we get changed for PE, let’s get Parsnip’s grey flannel shorts and hide them behind the toilet.’
And so they did.
And when the rest of my class had changed back into their school uniforms, there was I, searching the locker room in my baggy Man from U.N.C.L.E. underpants.
Hilarious – for them. Humiliating for me. Especially when I entered the classroom in my pants, gulping back the tears and holding a trembling hand in the air. ‘Please, miss,’ I gulped. ‘I can’t find my trousers ….’
How they roared. I remember every excruciating second. The glee on their faces, the choked-up feeling in my throat. And it was my first experience of that brutal, shameful, cheek-burning, eye-stinging dip in self-esteem that makes you wish you had never been born – or been born, but never lost your trousers.
It would be nice to think that we outgrow the world’s ability to humiliate us. It would be comforting to think that when we leave schoolbooks and playgrounds behind, we say good riddance to all that. And then one day – decades after the vicious japes of childhood are past – the terrible truth sinks in.
Someone is always hiding your trousers.
How can a grown man be humiliated? Losing something you were planning on keeping – your wife, your job, your underwear – these are the classics.
In the personal realm, being dumped by a woman you love immediately makes you feel as though you are five years old and some snickering bastard just stashed your short trousers in a secret hiding place. In the professional realm, losing your job is an infallible shortcut to humiliation.
Those two million unemployed will one day forget the sickening practicalities of unemployment – struggling to pay the bills, and confronting a cashpoint machine that has learned to say no. But they will never ever forget the feeling of not being wanted. They will never shake off the shame of being surplus to requirements. Bills get paid and bruises fade. A good woman can be replaced by a better woman. But the sting of humiliation stays with you forever.
Yet we are so ill equipped to deal with it. Humiliation – the ability of the wicked world to steal our trousers – always seems to sneak up on us.
The hard knocks of the working world, the fickle nature of romance, even the subtle betrayals of our body as we age-we see all these coming over the horizon and slowly marching towards us. But humiliation always feels box fresh.
At the end of an American book tour I sat in a radio station in California listening to the most loving introduction I had ever heard in my life. ‘Tonight,’ said the DJ, ‘we have a man in the studio whose work has touched the lives and the hearts of literally millions … a man who is just a man and yet – through the power of his work – unlike other men … Yes,’ he said, ‘Michael Douglas is coming into the studio later. But first … someone called Tommy Perkins.’
The cliché of the American book tour is that they have not read your book. The humiliating reality is that they rarely know you have written a book. From sea to shining sea, I have had hundreds of witless, white-toothed morons in assorted American radio and TV stations ask me, ‘What’s the item?’
They usually ask you about ten seconds before you are live on air. It means – Why are you here, dirt bag? And exactly why were you born?
You may fret about the night you could not get an erection, or that unfortunate flirtation with premature ejaculation, or when your mum caught you masturbating over the bra ad in her Littlewoods catalogue – especially if it was all on the same day – but you have not really taken a masterclass in humiliation until you have been on an American book tour.
I once did an event in Boston where, in the middle of a crowded, bustling book shop, I faced row upon row of empty seats. Only two people came – and one of them was a homeless person who woke up the moment I started speaking and spent the rest of the event trying to sneak out without hurting my feelings. It was very thoughtful of him. But it was far too late. This was gold-medal humiliation – mortification as an Olympic sport.
And I was humiliated again when only one woman turned up in Dallas. And I was humiliated when the only books I shifted in Atlanta were the dozen or so that were stolen by the same smiling young man. And I was humiliated in Chicago when the only question from the audience was from a mental little old lady who was obsessed with the British Royal Family.
‘Do you know Prince Philip?’
‘No, unfortunately I have never met the Duke of Edinburgh. Anyone else? Yes, the same lady …’
‘How about Prince Charles?’
And so it went on – from the next in line to the throne all the way down to the Duchess of Devonshire. And it was … humiliating.
But not quite as bad as being eleven years old, and realising that there was a girl in my class that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.
Far too shy to actually talk to her, I cunningly waited until Valentine’s Day and then left a soppy, heart-covered card on her desk, with my name written in big black letters. And when I walked into the classroom on the morning of 14th February, there she was, holding my card, surrounded by her friends – and my friends too! – and they were all wetting their regulation school knickers, pointing at me and laughing themselves sick.
From the womb to the tomb, from the cradle to the grave, the humiliation just keeps on coming. And it often kicks you right in your wedding tackle just when you were starting to think that you have the hang of this life thing.
Humiliation is life’s way of telling you that, somewhere deep down inside, you will always be that scared little boy who couldn’t find his trousers, or who was so naïve that he gave his Valentine card to the class heartbreaker, or made the terrible error of not being Michael Douglas when he was passing through California.
You think you grow out of being humiliated, but you never do. The job goes. Or the woman. Or perhaps you keep the job and the woman but somehow misplace your dignity – and that can hurt as much as all the rest.
TV is ripe for humiliation. I have seen people go on Question Time and shake so much that I hid behind the sofa. And I have seen people appear on Have I Got News for You and be so terrified that they never managed to say a full sentence – let alone exchange cutting, Oscar Wilde-level banter with the regular presenters. And then there was the poor sap who went on Mastermind and only managed to get two questions right in his specialist subject. How the world howled at his humiliation! The Daily Mail had a double-page spread on the humiliated thicko – AND YOUR SPECIALIST SUBJECT IS … PASS!!
I have done my unremarkable stints on Question Time and Have I Got News for You and Mastermind. And every time I left the studio I heaved an enormous sigh of relief. Because-while I had hardly set the world on fire with my wit, or intelligence, or knowledge – I had managed to avoid being totally humiliated.
And yet it comes to us all. It doesn’t really matter if you never know the horror of the American book tour or finding yourself unable to stop shaking on Question Time. Life will humiliate you elsewhere. Humiliation is wonderfully democratic like that.
I remember the first public speech I ever made. Those who know me as an accomplished after-dinner speaker, always equipped with a stream of gags and an amusing jar of cock rub, would have been shocked to see my total humiliation on my debut speaking engagement.
It was the last century. George Michael was twenty-four years old and so naturally it was time to write his life story. George and I were doing the book together. He talked and I tarted it up. Our publishers threw a big party for us at the Groucho Club. And I was asked to give the keynote speech. And it was one of the most humiliating experiences of my life. Because my speech stunk the place out.
I did not realise at the time that you can’t just write a speech and then read it out loud. I didn’t realise that if you do that then every single time you look up, you completely lose your place. And have to find it again. And then you stutter, and sweat, and feel like crying as George Michael and all these publishing big shots look at you but can’t meet your eye, just in case humiliation is contagious.
These days, I can speak in public until the audience soaks their Tiramisu with tears of mirth. And if we are ever in a changing room together, don’t even think about hiding my trousers because I never let them out of my sight.
But so what? Life will find some other way to humiliate me. We all get humiliated. The question is – what are you going to do about it?
Humiliation can be a springboard to greatness. When Muhammad Ali fought Joe Frazier in Madison Square Garden on 8th March 1971 they were both undefeated, and those of us who had grown up watching Ali firmly believed him to be unbeatable. Ali no doubt believed it too.
But Smoking Joe not only beat Ali – he broke his jaw. Joe quite literally shut Ali’s big, mocking mouth – the mouth that never tired of talking about how ugly Frazier was, and what an Uncle Tom he was, and what an inferior black man (despite Frazier’s skin being far darker than Ali’s). Ali was abjectly humiliated in Madison Square Garden that night. And yet somehow his greatness springs from that moment.
‘Everybody loses,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Probably be a better man.’
And so it proved.
And as Ali digested the humiliation of his first defeat, his face broken and swollen, those of us who loved him had never loved him more. Because he faced down humiliation like a man.
Frank Sinatra was the official photographer for Life magazine at that fight because he could not get a ringside seat. You might think that would be demeaning for one of the biggest stars in the world, but Sinatra’s legend is built on the way he dealt with humiliation after early success.
Before Sinatra landed two contracts – to play Private Maggio in From Here to Eternity, and a recording contract with Capitol records – he was all washed up. What we think of when we think of Sinatra – the concept albums with Nelson Riddle, the Oscar-winning acting – only came after the world had humiliated him. In 1952, after being dropped by Columbia and MCA, Frank Sinatra did not even have a recording contract. Humiliation indeed – but greatness was just two contracts away.
It would be comforting to believe that humiliation is invariably the gateway to glory. Unfortunately, losing your trousers – literally or metaphorically – is rarely the cue for winning an Oscar, or beating Smoking Joe in Manila. Despite all the humiliations that life brings, true greatness eludes us. But deep down inside the lowest moments of all is where you know yourself at last.
It never really ends. If childhood is ripe for humiliation, then so is puberty. And young manhood is stuffed with humiliating moments – losing a fight I remember as being particularly humiliating. It might not have been the Thriller in Manila, but it mattered desperately to me. Yet being beaten physically is nothing to the damage you receive psychologically. Sticks and head butts can break your bones, but it is the abject humiliation that really hurts.
What must old age be like? An endless series of doctors peering up your back passage and asking you to cough and telling you to put your trousers back on.
But you can’t!
Because the doctor has hidden them!
Seven Tough Guys Get Facials (#ulink_85e8231a-c46d-5792-8039-6ef744af8db5)
In the never-ending battle to be the best a man can be, the twenty-first century male is confronted by the same question again and again – where to draw the line?
Laser surgery to correct imperfect eyesight, cosmetic dentistry to give you a perfect smile – this is now the kind of routine self-improvement that we get done in our lunch break. But-where does it end? Or doesn’t it?
Over the last year I have had two red-blooded heterosexual males inform me that they plan to invest in a bottom-lift – which is exactly the same as a face-lift, but south of the border, down Mexico way. And to me – sorry – that just feels like a self-improvement too far.
Yet there is no denying that men are missing out on a lot of the things that women take for granted, and that make them healthier, happier and lovelier. And don’t men have the right to be healthier, happier and lovelier too?
What about the facial? To many men – for example, me – the facial has always been on the dark side of what is acceptable for a man. A bit too poncy. A tad too girly. Which just goes to show how far men still have to go.
Your dad and uncles would have reacted to a man-facial with distrust. Well, I have been to the mountain, and I have had a facial – and I see at last what I have been missing for years.
This just in – real men get facials.
As fallible, neurotic, profoundly messed-up human beings, we all have an insatiable appetite for self-improvement.
Or is that just me?
I am shocked and disturbed to discover that for every Penguin Classic or slim volume of poetry on my shelves, I seem to own many more books on getting rich, getting laid, getting fit, losing weight, winning fights, raising daughters, stopping smoking, starting a language and treating your own knees. I am a sucker for self-improvement, a junkie for self-help, a crack whore of self-motivation.
